75 years ago: Hoax adds cruel twist to Lindbergh case

"John Hughes Curtis, who fooled public, police and parents for two months while he perpetrated his heartless hoax" was brought to Flemington, the Democrat reported 75 years ago in the latest news about the Lindbergh kidnapping.

Bail was set at $10,000, a fortune during the Depression, but Prosecutor Anthony M. Hauck had sought bail of $50,000. Police Chief Walter Jones guided the car that brought Mr. Curtis here on a "circuitous route... and deceived the waiting throngs of news reporters and cameramen, supplemented by hundreds of Flemingtonians."

A few who knew about the jail's back entrance made a "mad dash" to get near him just as he topped the jailhouse steps. He "held his head erect, in spite of the shame he confessed." A state trooper ran ahead of Mr. Curtis, clearing a path through the crowd. Three more troopers pro-tected him from behind as a fourth carried his belongings.

Awaiting Mr. Curtis at the top of the steps was warden Mott Anderson. Once inside, the war-den slammed the door -- right in the face of the prosecutor magistrate. So intense was the Flemington crowd that police had to use force to keep it from trampling "the well-tended flower beds of jail matron Mrs. Anderson...."

The excitement Mr. Curtis created reflected the fame of the Lindberghs. One of many hoaxers who tried to profit from the kidnapping, his story is another odd twist in the Lindbergh tragedy.

Mr. Curtis, a 44-year-old small shipbuilder from Norfolk, managed to convince Col. Lindbergh that he was in contact with the kidnappers, and that they had concealed the toddler on a boat off Cape May. Yachts, aircraft and Col. Lindbergh himself participated in a frantic search. But Mr. Curtis "confessed Tuesday that his melodramatic activities were based on a stupendously vicious hoax he designed as a means of attracting free advertising to himself and to save him from bankruptcy." He had reportedly sold exclusive stories describing his contact with kidnap-pers to the New York Herald-Tribune and other papers.

In his confession, Mr. Curtis admitted, "I honestly believe that for the last seven or eight months I have not been myself due to financial troubles."

Mr. Curtis apparently returned to his senses while talking with his wife by telephone. "Tears streamed down the prisoner's face," reported the Democrat. "He asked her to make arrange-ments with friends to bail him out. What his disillusioned wife said to humiliate him to tears was not learned."

This article blithely states that John Hughes Curtis perpetrated a heartless hoax on the Lindbergh family, by pretending to have been in touch with their child's kidnappers. What the article fails to mention is that Curtis was in fact convicted of the exact opposite, i.e., conspiring with those same kidnappers.

This article is symptomatic of all the faux scholarship that has circulated around the case since 1932. A careful analysis of the facts strongly suggests that organized crime was behind the abduction of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., and that its motive was not extorting $50,000 from Lindbergh but freeing Al Capone from prison. In that regard it's altogether possible, even likely, that Curtis had been in contact with the gang hired by Capone to facilitate his scheme.

Capone, from his jail cell (but without knowing the child had died during the abduction) promised to return him to his parents in exchange for being let out. Perhaps Mr. DiGiovanni can explain to us how Capone, an intelligent man, would ever have made such a promise had Bruno Richard Hauptmann been the lone kidnapper. Does he assume Capone knew Hauptmann, or would have hired him to pull off the kidnapping by himself? The fact that Capone made the offer to begin with means he knew who had kidnapped the child.

Hauptmann might have worked for the gang by writing one or more of the ransom notes. He might have built the kidnap ladder. But he absolutely did not commit the crime alone.